Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

With 53 schemes in the Department I will not even pretend to know all the intricacies of each of them. I will be happy to speak to somebody about the individual cases raised here. All the section does is align a situation. At present, a self-employed person can make a claim and years later pay up the contributions, but the pension is paid from the date of the claim. What this states is that if one makes a claim and pays, one will be paid from then. It does not affect anybody making a claim in future. All it does is stop back payment for somebody trying to get around the system by making a claim now but not making payments for a number of years. It is aligning the date of the claim with the date of the payments and the pension is paid from the date of the payment not the date of the claim.